‘The proverbial safe hands’ – Wild Child & Other Stories by TC Boyle

TC Boyle, as I’m sure we don’t have to tell you by now, is one of our favourites. We’ve been reading him for a little over a decade (introduced to the author after a short stint as a would-be publicist in the lower echelons of the Bloomsbury bookcellar) and in that time he has – with the exception of odd blips here and there like Friend of the Earth & The Women – got better and better. Like William Trevor, when it comes to the apparently dying art of the short story, Boyle can conjure a world as meaty and fully-realised as many authors struggle to conjure over four or five hundred pages. The hoary old ‘this short story feels like a sumptuous four course meal’ is apposite in the case of Boyle. You read his stories and you have to sit back and loosen your belt, such a feast for the senses they are.

Wild Child & Other Stories is no exception, as rewarding, enjoyable, satisfying and memorable a collection as Tooth & Claw.  You know you’re in the company of a real master of the form when he can publish a themed collection of short stories. Most writers who are still in a position to be able to publish short stories gather together the stories they have written in the two or three years between novels and compile an anthology; Boyle writes stories with an eye on the eventual collection and so, when you read them collected, you can pick out themes and tropes and areas of obvious interest that recur and link and loop and circle back on each other. Wild Child opens with an epigram from Thoreau:

‘In Wildness is the preservation of the world.’

The epigram resonates throughout the book. Take the second story in the collection, ‘La Conchita’, in which a mudslide offers a salesman the opportunity to imagine a world in which he is the hero, reading in some respects like a short sequel to Boyle’s novel, The Tortilla Curtain. ‘Question 62’ transposes the lives of two sisters separated by two thousand miles, one of whom is entranced by an escaped big cat, the other of whom is entranced by a zealous man keen to do away with a species he views as vermin. But the ‘Wildness’ is not as obvious as environmental concerns. You can tell Boyle is an avid news and culture hound and he manages to explore contemporary issues refracted through the lens of a dialectic between what may on the surface look placid whilst underneath turmoil boils. There are stories here about plastic surgery (‘Hands On’), Creationism (‘Bulletproof’), fishing, ostensibly (‘Anacapa’) and feral children (the eponymous ‘Wild Child’ which some readers may have already snagged in a fairly recent McSweeneys). And always there is the push-me, pull-you, the tension between opposed viewpoints, each of which are beautifully realised. No-one can put you in a stranger’s shoes as well as Boyle. Read ‘Ash Monday’ to see what I mean: the neighbourly tension between a young boy and his mum and a Chinese couple in the California hills is beautifully rendered. 

Perhaps the most curious thing about Wild Child & Other Stories is how, despite the fact that stories range across geographic locations, historical time periods, genres (action in ‘The Unlucky Mother of Aquiles Maldonado’, family drama in ‘Balto’, vague sci-fi in the shape of ‘Admiral’), each story – hell, every word on the page – is recognisably Boyle. Once again he’s produced a book that you can relax into. You have nothing to worry about. He is the proverbial safe hands.

Any Cop?:  As good as anything he has written before, Wild Child is essential for Boyle fans, essential for shot story fans and just about essential for anyone who gets a kick out of a great book. Boyle is the man.